Roads to Safe Places

After finishing the Black Mesa mod I've been playing a couple of Portal and Half-Life Mods last week. 

This is the most fun kind of fanfiction I have yet to experience. 

( Minerva Metastasis )

( Dear Esther )

( Portal: Unity )

( Portal: Prelude )

( CWTH )

( The Citizen )

Firstly, I'd like to recommend the HumbleBundle to everybody who likes indie games out there. It's an awesome concept - you purchase a collection of indie titles and support the bundle's developers as well as Child's Play Charity at the same time - at a price you set yourself. You can give as much as you want and get the games and support whichever party with an amount you can set yourself, too. According to the site most people give around $6, though the games purchased individually would cost about $25. 
This time, they're offering a bundle which includes World of Goo, which is a fun game with a very enticing art style and a cool physics engine. Since this is a game that 90% of its users play illegally I'm happy about this because it's bound to support this cool little thing and might make more people purchase it and support not only the publishers, but also charity! 

Secondly, I'd like to invite everybody to look at this, because it's amazing: 

The Prince's Tale - Animation by *RandomMumble on deviantART

Now I'm going to bundle up in a blanket again and drink some more ginger water. Thanks for the recipe, Tetley, it's a miracle cure. 

So, today's the last day of school! Free time, possibly even warm weather, and even free LJ kisses, oh my!

What more could I ask for. I've got my big cup of cappuccino and I'm absolutely not preparing any lessons right now.

And of course I managed to get sick, but I'm used to that once the stress is gone, so I'm starting my holidays sniffling and sneezing once more. I'm not really in the holiday mood yet because I'm going to work on my thesis in summer and get to house-sit in Hamburg rather than going away somewhere, but it'll still be nice to have some free time, finally.

Apart from working on my concept I'm translating something for the charity that my neighbour runs and I'm contemplating which PC game to buy. Although that means I'll have to upgrade my graphics card sometime soon, because mine has been increasingly wobbly lately.

But other than being sick, everything's FINE.

You've all probably heard it already but I'm still slightly gobsmacked at the amount of sense written by this BioWare person (much better write-up over at ontd_p here and sf_d here).

What happened is this: they put out a game in which the fe/male main character can be romantically approached by both male and female NPCs. And everybody sees what's wrong there, clearly not enough content for exclusively straight males! But FEAR NOT, STRAIGHT MALE FANS!

One straight dude takes it upon himself to let BioWare know that they've neglected their main demographic, straight males (emphasis mine):


I'm not surprised, but what did floor me was the reaction of the company. Rather than say things on the lines of "but it's cheaper that way" or "focus on the F/F romance, it's hot", Daivd Gaider talks sense about privilege (with costliness thrown in, though, sadly):


Not that this makes me more likely to buy the game which still sounds pretty failtastic for various reasons, but this is nice.

On Wednesday, I went around my resolution not to log on during the week apart from on Friday night to have a look at the Frozen Halls, and oh, they were fun. They weren't over as quickly as dungeons are these days, we actually had to make sure and avoid pulling together the entire room and make sure we deal with mobs one group at a time. Fun times.

What made this all the more enjoyable was the fact that Recount decided to die on me and thus I could not even see potentially sucking as I plodded through unknown rooms and fought unknown bosses whom I had only ever read about. Of course we wiped, and of course I died, most annoyingly, because I wasn't quick enough to avoid Ick's poison nova. Twice. The best part about the second time is that I was battle rezzed by our druid just before we wiped. We did make it through the first two dungeons and did not dare doing the third. I did get a nice, shiny souvenir, though.

I've only attempted Halls of Reflection once so far, and I don't really know how anyone can survive that one. Our damage clearly wasn't good enough (me being the best DD with 3.3-3.4k damage -  we didn't stand a chance), and I am not sure how our healer managed to heal us without going OOM half-way through. I'm looking forward to doing this with a good healer and good DDs - it's pretty clear what people are supposed to be doing, I'm just not quite clear on how to get there, damage-wise.

Still, I do like this instance, even though it's only because I really enjoyed the Sylvanas sequence - I've had a soft spot for the Banshee queen ever since I first played WarCraft III (not so much a fan of her outfit, though. Even though I loved the new model when it first came out and still think she's very nice-looking, but I don't think her tummy needs to bare to achieve that. And don't get me started on the armour - it looks so uncomfortable).

Also, I love the random dungeon finder tool. I've never had so much fun in dungeons in ages, and it makes emblem collecting really easy. Only the time spent in the queue could be a lot shorter.Still, it means that I've finally got my emerald and ruby void achievement, doing this. Fun.

... And obviously, I like procrastinating as much as ever. I'll go have a very late supper now.

Given the entire purpose of MMORPGs it's rather strange, but I used to hate instances. This is why I didn't do them very often, which is why I sucked at them, which is why I didn't like going - especially with my Shadow Priest, because even though my DPS sort of sucked, I sucked even worse at healing, which I was usually forced to do, because, "Of course you'll manage! It's not that hard!" - which of course it was, especially in Ulda, where it's at times nigh impossible to see anyone and people kept running out of reach or not wait for the drinking casters, which is why no heals arrived, which is why they ended up dying a lot, which is why they got angry at me, which is why I avoided dungeon invites.
So - not really my thing.

Until I started going with people who know what they're doing, and until I started playing a class I enjoy rolling in a dungeon. Yes, I know, everybody loves them, they are ridiculously overpowered, they will be nerfed and stop being so awesome, but to my battered cloth-wearing little heart it is such a relief to be able to play a fierce and plate-encased imba melée class, it's bliss.

In other words I have just spent the evening on a different server than usual doing ridiculously fast Hellfire Ramparts/Blood Furnace runs with three other DKs, among them niaseath, of course, and a Priest and Shammy, rounding it off with an stint into the Slave Pens. And I Had A Good Time.



My DPS didn't suck, either, but maybe that was just everybody else only having played their DK for a couple of days and in one case being two level below the rest of us. Still, during the fight with Quagmirran I ended up top of the damage meter for the first time ever, and seeing as this is about my seventh time in an instance at all, I'm rather pleased with myself.

Fun. Me. In a dungeon. Go figure. 

Screw the quests there. They combine everything I ever found annoying about WoW quests. Come to think of it, screw pretty much all the quests in the western Grizzly Hills, I did not like those in the Drakil'Jin ruins, either, although Thor Modan annoyed me most - up to twenty iron dwarfs to defeat to get to the very back of the bloody canyon, and once you've completed the first quest, you get sent back in. Then, having procured whatever stupid item they sent you in for, it's, "Oh, we forgot to mention- we need some data. Please obtain it. From the very back of the cave."

WoW quests always were like that, of course, but I have never seen mobs respawn as quickly, so occasionally you have to fight your way in, then turn around only to find that everything's respawned and you have to fight your way out again. Thanks to the fact that the spaces are so confined, you can't even simply avoid and walk around mobs, you can't use your mount because it's inside, and of course those dwarves can stun you, so running is also out of the question.

I know, it's naive, but I had so hoped that they wouldn't include so many of the "kill number x of mob y and z" with the follow-up "get x items in the same area", and the final quest "kill the leader of y"-quest chains they always do to introduce you to new mobs. I do appreciate WotLK's new found phasing abilities (the entire quests in the Ebon Hold and the Battle for the Undercity quest chain are probably the coolest I've ever done) and quests where you can mount random creatures, even though my money might have been more sensibly invested in a single-player game, as I play it mainly for the quests, not the instances, or the raids, or PvP - I think I am not really cut out for MMORPGs which are really MMOPvPs and tend to place only little importance on the RPG part.

As far as real RPGing is concerned, my brother has been trying to talk me and Crocky into starting a group for table-top gaming. I liked that while I was doing it, and he's been curious for years. Crocky's intersted, too, but seeing as none of us are very experienced and we don't know anyone who'd do the honours of GMing, it will be difficult, as one of us would have to get so very familiar with our system of choice (so far, we're leaning towards D&D 3.5). Of course, we would start with with premade campaigns to get into things, but without anyone who knows what they're doing, it's doesn't really sound as though it's going to be that much fun. Quite apart from the fact that we're in different cities and would have to game via messenger and webcam and Gametable, anyway. I'm curious about how that'll go.